In Recovery...

Today is a very exciting day for us here at SQLskills.com as we take the first step at growing as a company instead of solely partnering with other consultants with their own companies. While we value our partnerships and plan to continue many, we also value the benefits brought by having a small and dedicated team of highly technical and skilled employees.

Specifically, we’ve asked Jonathan Kehayias to become employee #3 (with Kimberly being #1 and me being #2) and we’re extremely pleased that he accepted our offer.

We first met Jonathan four years ago when we crossed paths on the MSDN forums where he is a prolific provider of answers (actually the top answerer on the Database Engine forum) and we’ve been casually discussing eventually hooking up at some point for well over a year. This year the stars aligned and Jonathan is making the move, starting with us mid-March.

Jonathan is the world authority on Extended Events in SQL Server 2008—he wrote the definitive whitepaper on Extended Events for Microsoft and he authored the Extended Events Manager SSMS add-in, which won the PASS 2008 SQL Hero contest. He has a thirst for knowledge and digging into the guts of SQL Server that’s truly inspiring, and he constantly impresses us with how much he knows.

Jonathan is a performance tuning expert, both SQL Server and hardware, and has architected complex systems as a developer, business analyst, and DBA. This breadth of role experience, along with extensive development (T-SQL, C#, and ASP.Net), hardware and virtualization design expertise, and Windows, Active Directory, IIS, and other component knowledge makes Jonathan an incredible addition to our team. He has also presented at multiple conferences including PASS, SQLBits, and VMware Open Forum, and will be presenting at PASS SQL Rally and SQL Connections this Spring.

Jonathan is also a Drill Sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves, and did a tour of duty in Iraq in 2004. He’s married with two small children and describes himself as a ‘general goofball’—he’s going to fit right in :-) In all seriousness though, his dedication to his family, his country and his work is without doubt extraordinary.

You can follow Jonathan on twitter and he'll be moving his blog over to SQLskills.com very soon.

One of the most interesting aspects about Jonathan being a real employee rather than a partner consultant is that we’re not limited to only working on client projects. We’re going to be working on research, benchmarks, tools, and other really useful things for the SQL community, our classes, and our clients. We’re already planning resources that will be available exclusively to our SQLskills.com community. Join now!

As you can tell, we’re really looking forward to Jonathan starting to work at SQLskills.com and we’re planning great things to come plus more additions to the team. Watch this space…

Just one question in regards to the whole "being a real employee rather than a partner consultant is that we’re not limited to only working on client projects"? If you wanted to have a consultant to non consulting work, couldn’t you just assign him or her to a non-billable project and pay him out of pocket, instead of billing someone there rate times your multiplier? As an employee don’t you still have to justify his existence with x amount of billable hours per week/month/quarter, or declare him part of some cost sink?

I don’t know much about running a business, so I’m curious about the though process there.

Hey Justin – yes, but this way is far easier, plus as an employee we can offer all kinds of employee benefits that don’t apply to consulting partners, plus guaranteed stability. It works out really well on so many levels.